Saturday, June 28, 2014

Bestselling Economist Steven Levitt: “I no longer feel like an adult... I’m in the candy store and I get to pick and choose whatever I want.”

By Tim Harford

“I used to play poker a ton and then I quit. It’s too time consuming and toooo boring.” There’s something boyish about the way Steve Levitt drags out the word. But then his inner economist reasserts itself: “What you come to realise about poker over time is that the ratio of luck to skill in the short term is too high to make it feel productive.”

Here’s what you need to know about Levitt. He used to be a rising star in academia, with prestigious positions at Harvard and then Chicago. He picked unusual topics: cheating sumo wrestlers; the link between legal abortion and falling crime. His detective work with data was influential. In 2003, when he was just 35, Levitt won the John Bates Clark medal, often a precursor to the Nobel memorial prize. The journalist Stephen Dubner profiled him in The New York Times Magazine; a book deal followed for the pair, and the result, Freakonomics, sold four million copies.

So, I’m playing poker with a data-savvy millionaire genius, a game I understand only in the sense that I’ve written about it. The good news is that Levitt doesn’t play any more. The bad news is that on his last outing, five years ago, he was within one hand of the final table at the World Series of Poker … I am doomed.